Charles Dickens: A Very Short Introduction
Jenny Hartley
28 February 2019
ISBN: 9780198714996
160 pages
Paperback
174x111mm
In Stock
Price: £8.99Jenny Hartley introduces Charles Dickens's life and works, looking at the vitality of his characters and the energy which surges through his writing. Examining the themes running through his books, she considers the institutions which influenced his work (such as the workhouse) and looks at his critique of nineteenth century society.
Description
Jenny Hartley introduces Charles Dickens's life and works, looking at the vitality of his characters and the energy which surges through his writing. Examining the themes running through his books, she considers the institutions which influenced his work (such as the workhouse) and looks at his critique of nineteenth century society.
- Covers the life and work of Charles Dickens, with examples taken from all his major works and writing
- Considers the key themes in Dickens's novels, and the way in which he used his writing to critique the great dehumanising structures, ideologies, and bureaucracies of nineteenth-century Britain
- Examines the potent and multiple after-lives of Dickens's novels, and their ongoing impact today
- Explores Dickens's own career and life, and the influence this had on his writing
- Discusses Dickens's treatment by critics through the ages
- Part of the Very Short Introductions series - over nine million copies sold worldwide
- Originally published in hardback as Charles Dickens: An Introduction
About the Author(s)
Jenny Hartley, Emeritus Professor at the University of Roehampton
Jenny Hartley is Emeritus Professor at the University of Roehampton. She is the author of two books on British women's writing from the Second World War, and The Reading Groups Book (2001, 2002 OUP), a pioneering survey of reading groups. Her work on Dickens includes Charles Dickens and the House of Fallen Women (Methuen 2008) and editing The Selected Letters of Charles Dickens (OUP 2012). She is a founder member of the Prison Reading Groups project, and was President of the International Dickens Fellowship 2013-2015.
Table of Contents
- List of illustrations
Note on editions used
1:More
2:Public and private
3:Character and plot
4:City laureate
5:Radical Dickens
6:Dickensian
Timeline
Further reading
Index
Reviews
"A fair, entertaining and careful chronicler of Dickens's life, and an illuminating and inspiring reader of his works. For those unfamiliar with his writing, Charles Dickens: An introduction offers the best brief guide now available. For those of us who know it well, it encourages us to return to Dickens with renewed enthusiasm and an enlarged heart." - Times Literary Supplement
"Jenny Hartley [...] has achieved a miracle of compression in this charmingly packaged book ... the success of this pocket guide, however, lies in her clever selection of themes and emphases, and in her ability to relate all things Dickensian to the way we live now." - Michael Wheeler, Church Times Summer Books Supplement
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